Fern Factor of my time Then during 1990 we had a gold mining operation come and start bulldozing large tracts of land in our area to start open cast mining I was initially devastated by this and then started thinking what can we do So we got our spades and started digging out all of the ferns before the bulldozer got to them Our fern business was born We built a shadehouse with a small greenhouse attached The grand size of 8m by 3m The ferns were potted on But we needed to check out the market so to Christchurch we travelled It was here that I noticed a small niche in the market that was not being filled Later that year Paul found a much larger shadehouse 56m by 11m in a small valley just out of Christchurch We leased this for a days gardening a week and slowly but surely developed our operation It was here in a skyline garage that I started to work on the process of spore propogation realising that I couldn t rely on wilding taken straight from the bush plants In March 1997 we bought our existing site a 15 acre paddock It is here